Google picks the right neighborhoods to build fiber in Kansas City

7 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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Google Fiber strategy of cherry picking neighborhoods in the Kansas City area seems to be working. A study done by an investment research company shows that 75% of the homes in medium to high income areas that are passed by Google Fiber are subscribing to it (h/t to Fred Pilot at Eldo Telcom for the pointer). In low income areas, the study claims that 30% of homes passed are taking Google’s service.

Bernstein Research commissioned the study, which involved knocking on the doors of 350 homes in Google’s current – and limited – service area.… More

No fast answers for Google Fiber hopefuls or competitors

6 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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All the possible pins are still in place.

Google will keep 34 cities – along with AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and the rest – guessing whether fiber-to-the-home is coming, at least until “the end of the year”. Last Thursday was the deadline for those communities to do their Google Fiber homework…

All of them have, for the most part, completed their checklists.

We say “for the most part” because there’s still a lot of work to do over the next few months.

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Don't start the muni broadband party until FCC chair Wheeler puts it in writing

Given FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s tap dancing on net neutrality regulations and his long pedigree as a lobbyist for cable and mobile interests, there’s good reason to carefully parse anything he says. Including what seemed to be pro-muni broadband remarks made last week at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association’s annual show in Los Angeles…

For many parts of the communications sector, there hasn’t been as much competition as consumers and innovation deserve. Given the high fixed costs and consequent scale economies, this isn’t especially surprising.

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Is it crazy to hope a broadband merger could increase competition?

4 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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For the umpteenth time, AT&T is said to be in talks to buy a major U.S. direct broadband satellite (DBS) company, in this case DirecTv. The first time I heard this rumor was in 1995, when DirecTv and the company I was working for, U.S. Satellite Broadband (later merged together), did a joint marketing deal with what is now AT&T (but was SBC back then).

In fact, SBC’s later acquisition of the business and brand was partly due to the failed cable ambitions of the old AT&T.… More

The more broadband, the more interest in more broadband


Click to download the presentation.

One of the thousand or so communities, companies, organisations and private individuals that’s expressed interest in participating in the FCC’s rural broadband experiment program is the City of Marina, on Monterey Bay, which is where I live and work, at least when I’m not traveling somewhere.

It came out of a conversation I had with the city’s economic development coordinator, Marilyn Lidyoff, and a member of the economic development commission, Steve Emerson, at a local regional economic development conference back in March.… More

FCC chair Wheeler relies on clairvoyance to police innovation

2 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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Survival in Washington means keeping a firm hand on your ball.

Earlier this week, I asked whether FCC chair Tom Wheeler is dumb enough to think we’re dumb enough to believe that network neutrality means something other than Internet service that doesn’t discriminate amongst content providers on the basis of who is writing the bigger check to your ISP. Wheeler’s answer appears to be a resounding yes.

In a new blog post, the freshman chairman confirmed that ISPs will be allowed to sell pay-for-play fast lanes to content and service companies, so long as it’s “commercially reasonable”, a vague term that guarantees nothing except mountains of billable hours for lobbyists and lawyers.… More

Bill raising broadband construction costs sent to Sacramento's inner sanctum

1 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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A proposal to hike the cost of subsidised broadband projects in California is in the hands of legislative leaders, who will decide its fate behind closed doors.

On Wednesday, the assembly appropriations committee put assembly bill 2272 on hold via a procedural mechanism called the suspense file. It joins a long list of bills that will stay in legislative limbo until the state budget is passed. Senior assembly members will then meet in private to decide which bills go forward and which do not.… More

Rural telcos can bust a move on big incumbents, says CPUC commissioner

Typically, telephone companies do not intrude on each other’s territory, but that’s a matter of custom, not a fundamental law of the universe. Commissioner Catherine Sandoval says that breaking down that barrier could be a way to improve broadband coverage in rural areas, if small rural telephone companies are willing to take on big incumbents, with the encouragement of the California Public Utilities Commission.

She spoke at the Central Sierra Connect Broadband Consortium conference in Tuolumne City last week about going to public meetings in rural areas and hearing from speaker after disgruntled speaker…

It turns out that what they were disgruntled about is they said that ‘my neighbor who’s just down the road has terrific Internet access and I don’t have Internet access and I want better Internet access’.

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Slashing the cost of getting to yes clears the way for broadband upgrades

29 April 2014 by Steve Blum
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If you want fast and cheap Internet service, then your permit process has to be fast and cheap, too. That was the essence of the message that Santa Cruz County supervisor Zach Friend delivered to the Central Sierra Connect Broadband Consortium conference in Tuolumne City last week.

Traditionally, getting county approval to bury fiber or install an equipment box was a complicated process that subjected broadband projects to the same level of scrutiny and one-off analysis that might be applied to a new shopping center.… More

Comcast occupies Crimea, I'm sorry, California

28 April 2014 by Steve Blum
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Comcast will be, by far, the dominant cable company in California, if the proposed acquisition of Time-Warner Cable and today’s announcement of a pie-slicing deal with Charter Communications come to pass.

In order to get the Time-Warner purchase past federal regulators, Comcast wants to trim back what would be its combined customer base to 30 million homes, which is about half the cable TV subscribers in the U.S. So this morning it announced a scheme to spin off some Time-Warner subscribers into a company effectively controlled by Charter Communications (which would become the second biggest cable operator in the U.S.),… More